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by ohallows



Series: podcast girls week 2020 [4]
Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Heist, Suspense, the grizzop is very minor, white hat hacker sasha
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:07:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25165168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohallows/pseuds/ohallows
Summary: Sasha has slippery fingers. This hasn’t changed since she’d been a kid and stuck on the streets, stealing enough coin to get what she and Brock needed to survive. The only difference now is that she’s much better - can peel a painting off a wall while someone’s looking at it, honest - and she’s figured out how to turn this particular skill into her career.
Series: podcast girls week 2020 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1820245
Comments: 11
Kudos: 32
Collections: Podcast Girls Week





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**Author's Note:**

> white hat security consultant sasha !! take idk 3?? i really am into this small world that lives inside my brain.
> 
> i think i’ve talked about this aspect of this au before but also i’m just really into this concept so have fun i love sasha racket sm

Sasha has slippery fingers. This hasn’t changed since she’d been a kid and stuck on the streets, stealing enough coin to get what she and Brock needed to survive. The only difference now is that she’s much better - can peel a painting off a wall while someone’s looking at it, honest - and she’s figured out how to turn this particular skill into her career. 

It hadn’t been something she’d ever considered, not until Zolf had mentioned the opportunity. A few test runs, a hundred business cards picked up, and convincing Hamid to make a few cold calls to his contacts later, and Sasha had been in business. And now, three years out, it’s doing better than ever. Helps that she’s never messed up on a job. She gets one job every few weeks, and with how much the payout is, she’s living comfortably. Even convinced Zolf to let her and Hamid shell out for a new prosthetic for him after his had started going by the wayside. 

Plus, her slippery fingers come in even more handy once she’s inside and taking her pick of what souvenirs she wants to bring with her once she’s completely beat their security. People don’t like that aspect of it, and she’s gotten loads of angry calls in the past when they realise that she’s made off with more than just their money. 

To be fair, this is all written up in the contract. So many people just don’t read the fine print, which is all well and good for Sasha, because it means she gets to embarrass the rich corporations that hire her twice - once when she breaks in and proves that, for all their security, they still have blind spots, and second when they realise that stuff is missing from the building and try to accuse her of theft. She had Saira draw up the contract for her - best bonus of being well-connected with an al Tahan, even if she does have to deal with Hamid stealing her food anytime he visits her and Zolf’s flat - and it’s a sweet sort of victory, being able to point right to the lines saying that Sasha is able to take any two items she wants, regardless of worth or personal sentimental value. 

She isn’t an asshole, she’s not going to take someone’s, like, photo of their kids or anything. And she’s got her own moral code about it, stuff that isn’t written into the contract - no stealing from the lower level employees, just the bosses who have more money than they’d ever need and really, really don’t need to have as much stuff as they do. Plus, it’s usually stuff that catches her eye because it reminds her of someone she cares about - something pretty for Azu, something fancy for Hamid, something sturdy for Zolf, something efficient for Grizzop, or something just plain weird for Cel. Sometimes she’ll grab books or collectibles for Wilde or Brock, but those occasions happen less - mostly because Wilde is hard to track down on the best of days and Brock is usually off on his own clandestine missions halfway across the world. 

Sasha cracks her knuckles and then her neck, stretching out her shoulders as she stares at the building opposite her. All the lights are off, and the building itself has been dropped into darkness. She smiles; she works best in the dark. It’s a quick thing to check for everything in the utility belt slung around her waist - she might not agree with a lot of the shite Batman pulls, but a utility belt? Useful. 

Tonight’s job is another fun one - someone boasting about how their security system is unbreakable, and hiring Sasha to prove the point. And, well, she’ll prove it alright, but not the way they want her to. Most of her jobs are like this, honestly, and it never gets old showing people the cracks in their security system. Particularly when they’re so far up their own arse in cockiness that they can’t see daylight anymore. 

She slips on her gloves - the final step in the job, always has been, always will be (there’s a lot to be said about superstition, and Sasha doesn’t believe in much, but Bi Ming was the one who taught her about that, not Barrett or Eldarion or even Rakefine, so she puts way more stock in it than anything else) - and swallows. The adrenaline starts to pound through her veins, the way it always does when she’s about to start a job, and steps to the edge of the building, balancing there as the wind rushes through her short-shorn hair. 

“Grizzop?” she asks, pressing down on the earpiece. “All set?”

She hears some furious typing on the other end - honestly, she has no idea how his computer hasn’t lit up in flames before now with how fast he is - and then Grizzop laughs. “They’re using an outdated version of the software. Haven’t updated it in three years. I was cracking tech like this when I was fifteen. Amateurs.”

Sasha cracks a smile herself. Grizzop is the youngest of their small friend group, but he’s skilled and quick and smart, and there’s no one she trusts more to be on the other side of her communicator in these situations (Zolf would do a passable job, but he does get all ‘old man angry about technology’ sometimes, which entertains them all even though he’s barely out of grad school). 

“Tell me when,” she says, just like she does on any job (okay, maybe she’s more than a little superstitious) and rocks back and forth on the balls of her feet. Grizzop types for a few more seconds, and then she hears the little self-satisfied noise he makes in the back of his throat.

“When,” he says smugly, because he always does, and Sasha rolls her eyes the way she always does, and then it’s on.

Taking a breath, she pulls back on the bow that she’s brought with her and angles it straight across, before tilting the bow up a bit. Grizzop had taught her this, too, and it had made it a lot easier and more accurate than the crossbow she’d started with. She shoots the bow, and watches the line sail through the air until it sticks, secure, to the side of the building. They’re high up enough (and it’s late and dark enough) that no one passing by will notice them, so Sasha squares her shoulders and gets ready for the hard part - climbing.

Swinging under the rope with her carabiner securing her, she slowly pulls herself along, arms straining with the effort, until she makes it up to the window and gives herself a moment to rest. She swings around before long, resting her feet against the window she’s in front of, and presses her palm to the glass. Cel had given her a new tool recently, and it had worked incredibly well on its test run, so she wants to see if she can duplicate the success. 

Honestly, she’s so glad they got Cel on the team. Not only are they, just, incredibly neat and talented and knowledgeable, they make wicked tech. It’s like having her own personal Q, except way cooler and less of a prat. Plus, they’re all too happy to help Sasha come up with anything either of them could want for a cut of the reward money. Sasha’s happy to share - she does the same with Grizzop too, and Brock if he’s helping her out one of the nights he’s back in town. 

Anyway, she has Cel to thank for the handy little penknife that fits in the palm of her glove, and Grizzop to thank for disabling all the security cameras running along the outside of the building as she cuts a hole in the glass big enough to fit. She carefully pushes it in, catching the edges before it can crash to the ground, and lowers it silently as she flows into the room, immediately becoming one with the shadows behind a potted plant.

“Status?” she whispers, mouth barely moving, but Grizzop picks her up loud and clear.

“All good to go. Have fun,” he says, and she can hear the smile in his voice as he sits back away from the mic. He’ll get the security back up when Sasha is done, but he basically just gets to chill for the next few minutes while Sasha makes short work of the job. 

She memorised the blueprints the night before, quizzing herself over and over until she could see the entire layout in her head. It doesn’t take long to figure out where she is - the office she needs to get to is only a few floors above her, and the security guards are going to be easy enough to maneuver around. Sasha never gets caught, after all. Taking a breath, she pulls her mask over her face, covering everything but her eyes, and double checks that her wrist sheaths are loaded. 

Tonight’s is a fun job and an easy one - there had only been one objective in the contract that they drew up: hacking into the CFO’s computer (honestly, people always go for the CEO in movies, which makes no sense. The CFO has all the fun information, anyway) and retrieving a specific file. It’s a pretty open brief, which Sasha likes - it means she gets to have fun breaking the rest of their security in new and creative ways. 

She slips out from behind the plant but sticks closely to the shadows as she maneuvers around the room, stepping carefully through the door as she avoids the cameras. They should be off, but it’s a just-in-case that she never really got out of the habit of. 

A security officer passes through the end of the hallway and Sasha melts against a cubicle until they’ve gone again, footsteps fading into the distance. She gives in another moment, just to be safe, and then sidles up to the door leading up to the next floor. It’s easy enough to pop open the security case and fiddle with the cords inside. She’s done this a thousand times on a thousand different systems, so this is like a cakewalk. It doesn’t take her long to connect the correct wires, and then the case blinks a bright green. 

She carefully puts it back, ensuring it looks like it was never messed with in the first place, and then pulls the door open a crack with a satisfied smile. She takes a moment to listen for any footsteps, wanting to ensure that there aren’t any guards in the stairwell. No sound comes, and so Sasha steps inside, just a mark of black paint in the light that comes from the stairwell; the door slips shut behind her, silent, and then she starts ascending. She’s on the third floor of the building, and needs to get up to the sixth - easy enough, really, even if she does wish that she could just take the elevator sometimes. 

Three floors later, Sasha is panting a little bit - she’s more than in shape, but for some reason stairs always leave her more winded than anything else - and she takes a second to compose herself before she pushes the door open to the sixth floor.

She glances left and right and, upon seeing no one and hearing no one, lets the door fall shut behind her as she steps through. If the maps in her mind are correct (they are), then the CFO’s office should be just around the corner. After one more quick check, Sasha heads down the hall and turns, and then she spots the CFO’s name on a golden nameplate hanging on the corner office door. It’s got that fancy frosted glass that’s impossible to see through, so Sasha has no idea what’s waiting for her on the other side.

That’s happened before - cheeky clients trying to one-up her and have an entire armed staff guarding the objective. It hadn’t worked, of course - Sasha wasn't just good with knives. Through Barrett, Eldarion, and Bi Ming, Sasha’d been trained in a number of different styles - plus, her acrobatics had made it hilariously easy to just leap over them, rip out the cords and grab the computer, and then dive backward out of the (helpfully) open window where Cel was ready to catch her. Got paid double on that job, just for the trouble (and for how impressed her employers were, but most of her employers leave a mix of impressed and frustrated, so that was less novel.)

She makes it to the door and pulls open her lockpick, getting ready to break in. She tries the knob first; it’s a habit she’s gotten into, after a few missions, and her instincts are rewarded as the door swings open at her gentle push. She rolls her eyes. Honestly, all the security in the world can’t account for laziness and forgetfulness. It’s not something to complain about, though - just one less task to do before she hacks into the computer. She carefully shuts the door behind her, staring intently at the ground. There’s a slight brush of air and the air ripples, shifting as she notices a small, red line stretching across the floor. 

Motion detector, then. Sasha delicately steps over it, careful not to shift the carpet even slightly, and then makes her way over to the computer. 

She sits in the chair - it’s comfier than anything she owns, and one day she’ll figure out how to steal an entire chair from a place before her personal timer (and patience) runs out. 

She pulls the small flash drive out of her pocket and smirks at it. It’s a particularly nasty piece of work, this. Thanks, again, goes to Cel. They and Grizzop had figured out how to make the security cracker on the flash drive work even quicker so that Sasha really can be in and out without anyone the wiser, and it works like a dream. She sticks the flash drive into the port, sits back, and waits as the entire hard drive is duplicated and copied over to the flash drive in a few minutes. 

While she waits, she glances around the office, looking for anything that she can grab to bring to her friends back home. Two items, as always. Last time she nabbed something for Hamid (a very, very fancy marbled tea coaster - he’d been complaining about how unbalanced the ones at the bank were, whatever the hell that meant) and Azu (a bright pink tiara that they just had… sitting out, for some reason), so this go around she’s looking for something for Zolf and Grizzop. 

Zolf’s is easy. Sasha spies the all-new Campbell book on the corner of their desk, and immediately reaches for it. She remembers Zolf complaining about how every bookstore was out of it a few days ago, and how they weren’t able to restock it quickly enough - Zolf had enough trouble getting to the bookstore what with his hours at hospital, and Azu had the same issue. Normally, Hamid would go out and buy it for one of them, considering he had the time, but he was back in Cairo until the end of next week and couldn’t make that particular miracle happen.

Sasha could, though. She smiles and pockets it - Zolf always puts up a stink when she comes home with a gift for him, but he quiets enough when he realises that Sasha isn’t going to take it back. He grumbles, too, which Sasha would think he’d picked up from her if he hadn’t been a bit of a grump when they’d first met. And she knows he won’t even be able to pretend not wanting this particular gift, not with how badly he’s been waiting to read this book. 

One down, one to go. Grizzop’s is a bit harder - he’s not really one for material possessions, so half the time Sasha gets him something to give to Veeseek or Eva. She glances around, and gets lucky. Sitting on a bookshelf running along the side of the room (honestly, who even needs that many books? It better go to an underground lair or secret hideout or something, that’s just… so much wasted space) is a small ball, clearly well used. Sasha creeps over, being careful of any security sensors along the way, and reaches out to grab it, peering at the writing along the edge. It’s advertised as an unbreakable stress ball, which is something Grizzop sorely needs. The last stress ball he’d had exploded in a mess of sand all over the van, and it had taken Sasha ages not to feel little grains in her hair when she went to shower. She pockets that too, and hopefully it’ll last longer than the previous one did. 

Last thing is the calling card. She fishes around in her pockets, never sure where it ended up, and eventually pulls out the 3D-printed knife (thanks, Cel) and a copy of the original contract she’d signed. Satisfied, she lays the contract on the desk and drives the knife into the wood - it’s cheap, not what she expected based on how rich everything else is, and the knife stabs through easily. She really should figure out how Cel makes the knives that sharp; usually, they just give the knives to her in batches, and then dashes off to some other place in their workshop before Sasha can ask. 

She sets the flashdrive next to it - she learned early on that there’s no need to actually take it with her when she escapes. It scares the big corporate exec types enough to know that someone was able to hack past their firewall, and now she doesn’t even need to come back at all. They can just wire the payment to her account, as promised. 

And speaking of not coming back; she stealthily makes her way out of the room and down the hallway and stairs, carefully avoiding all the motion sensors and jumping from blind spot to blind spot as she uses a jammer to sporadically bugger up the camera feeds. It’s not long before she makes it to the window she got in through, and easily slips out through the hole she’d already cut in it. 

From there, it’s an easy slide back to the rooftop that she started on, and she pulls the rope with her once she’s landed. She wraps it up and pulls off her mask, stuffing it all into the rucksack that she slings across her shoulders before going down the fire escape.

Her boots hit the ground and she taps at her watch to stop the timer. Eleven minutes. She frowns. Could have been quicker, honestly, but that’s a problem for future her to deal with. And it won’t affect the pay at all, which she should get wired to her account tomorrow. 

She pulls open the door to the van and Grizzop swirls around in his chair, doing his best impression of an evil villain complete with evil smirk, but it drops quickly enough when Sasha shoves at his shoulder.

“I’m assuming it went well, then?” Grizzop asks, as though it ever doesn’t, and Sasha drops her bag on the floor and slumps into the seat next to him as he gets the van ready to drive. 

“One of the easier ones,” she says. “Honestly, their security is terrible, I don’t know what they were trying to prove.”

“I mean, they’re men? So?” Grizzop says, and Sasha conceded the point. 

“Can probably convince them to hire me again, though,” she muses, and Grizzop makes a noise of agreement. Her stomach rumbles. “Gods, I’m starving, can we get some takeaway?”

“Already called your favorite Chinese place, it’ll be ready by the time we show up,” Grizzop says, and Sasha, again, remembers why Grizzop is the best person to have on the other side of this. 

She stares out the window, satisfied, while Grizzop drives away, chattering about something that she’s only half paying attention to, and flips one of her knives up and down in her hands.

Another successful night. 

**Author's Note:**

> girls week!!!!! kudos and comments super appreciated, also hmu on tumblr @ohallows !!


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